Fixed Ops Journal - June 2017 - 30

FIXED OPS JOURNAL

Dealers' top aftermarket foe pushes trust agenda

DALE BUSS

foj@autonews.com

hen Meineke Car Care Centers
Inc. launched in 1972, it offered
basics such as muffler service. Its
first ads featured the slogan:
"You're not going to pay a lot for a muffler."
Since then, Meineke says it has become the
largest aftermarket car care franchise in the
United States, servicing about 3 million vehicles a year and handling as many as 4 million
visits, including repeat customers.
Meineke's 900-plus stores check and replace
fluids, filters, belts, brakes and tires, and perform suspension and steering service. Its Tire
Wire program enables customers to shop for
tires online and have them shipped to the
nearest Meineke store for installation.
Meineke is part of Driven Brands, a holding
company for car care companies whose other
franchises include Maaco car-painting outlets
and Take 5 Oil Change stations.
Its business model has brought Meineke into ever more direct competition with fran-

DIAGNOSTIC
continued from Page 28

executive vice president of global marketing,
sales and service.
Other automakers assert that a hard-wired
system offers more proprietary data and functions than a system based on an OBD-II port.
"Meineke and others can get vehicle speeds
and other information through the port," says
David Ploucha, president of Control-Tec, a
provider of telematics and analytics software
that Delphi acquired in 2015.
"But door-lock states, internal temperature
settings and other information that you get
from the HVAC controller, they can't get because it's proprietary," he says. "Without a
good, proprietary relationship with an OEM,
you're going to struggle to get rich data.
"In the case of the typical vehicle, there are
20,000 to 30,000 signals that you could capture," Ploucha adds, "and the OBD-II port will
only allow you to capture about 20 of them."
OnStar is the original hard-wired connectivity system. Diagnostics have been an important part of what it offers owners.
"Door unlocks and other commands we're
beginning to use, such as remote disable and

PAGE 30

JUNE 2017

Meineke says it has become the largest U.S.
aftermarket vehicle care franchise.

chised dealerships' service departments as
well as aftermarket rivals. Its marketing tag
line: "On With Life."
"Our whole business model now, and how
we go to market, is to acknowledge that what
consumers want today is not to have to deal
with this part of life," says Danny Rivera,
Meineke's president since 2014.
"So we're trying to solve that life problem for
vehicle location, can be great productivity enhancements," says Greg Ross, OnStar's director of commercial experiences.
"Because we are built into the vehicle, we
have a privileged connection to the data in the
vehicle, and we can build additional applications," Ross says.
"If you've just got an OBD-II port, you've got
to do lots of trial and error to figure out what
you can do with the data."
Hyundai's Blue Link technology generates a
monthly report on a vehicle's health. It allows
owners to schedule service from inside the vehicle, among other diagnostic-related functions.
Toyota provides a subscription program
through its Lexus luxury brand called Service
Connect, which opens diagnostic data to customers. Toyota is expanding the program to
include the Camry, starting in the 2018 model
year.

Security issues
Sandy Lobenstein, vice president for connected strategy and product planning of Toyota Motor North America, says the automaker
does not use onboard diagnostic devices for
remote diagnostics "because we prioritize
customer data privacy and security."

them versus, 'Yes, we can fix your brakes.' We
want to take more of their business with each
transaction."
Rivera is an engineer who previously
worked at AutoNation, General Electric and
Burger King. He led major projects to improve
customer experience and install state-of-theart technology for Meineke and Maaco before
he became Driven Brands' chief information
officer in 2012.
He emphasizes not only giving customers a
broad menu of services, but building relationships so that they'll feel comfortable relying
on Meineke as "a convenient place that they
can trust to work on their car."
Meineke's rewards program, which has
hundreds of thousands of members, gives
customers a point for every dollar they spend,
applied to their next visit or repair.
"Our customers like it for the same reason
people like the Starbucks rewards program,"
Rivera says. "They'd rather go somewhere to
get a longer benefit than just getting their
brakes fixed." 
"We feel that information should only be
transported via embedded telematics devices
[that] create peace of mind and build a stronger relationship between the customer and
the dealer," Lobenstein says.
Some experts in vehicle diagnostics and
connectivity assert that opening the OBD-II
port to aftermarket companies' data-interpreting devices can be dangerous. The systems weren't designed for such uses and
could become portals for cyberhacking vehicles' computing systems, they warn.
"The computer [network] in cars was never
meant for public access," says Jeff Warra, business development manager for Spirent Communications, a British telecom testing company. "The guys attaching these devices may
be voiding warranties.
"Imagine driving down the road and maybe
getting intermittent operation of your cruise
control because of it," Warra says. "And there
are also cybersecurity issues involved."
Another potential obstacle for companies
that want to base enhanced customer relationships on OBD-II ports is that electric vehicles don't need them.
"As the electrification movement advances,"
Ploucha says, "the diagnostic port stuff goes
away." 

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Fixed Ops Journal - June 2017